New Leadership at V.Group

Leading ship management conglomerate V.Group announced Friday that it has appointed a new CEO and chief commercial officer.

Incoming CEO Ian El-Mokadem has a background in the testing and calibration industry as the former CEO of Exova. Exova provides testing and advisory services in the aerospace, defense and energy industries, with a network of nearly 140 labs worldwide. He has also worked at Compass Group, Centrica and Accenture.

New chief commercial officer Martin Gaard Christiansen arrives from Wrist Group, the world's largest stores and provisions supplier to the shipping and offshore sectors, where he was CEO of Asian operations. Gaard is also an alumnus of AP Moller-Maersk, most recently its APM Terminals division, where he was CEO for the Asia-Pacific region.

“The appointment of two such high calibre business leaders is testament to V.Group’s ambitions to consolidate its position as the global market leader in its sector," said John Pattullo, V. Group's new chairman.

V.Group appointed Pattullo in March, along with non-executive director Jesper Kjaedegaard, a veteran of Maersk Group. Pattullo's previous roles included CEO at CEVA Logistics, along with senior positions at Proctor & Gamble and Exel. V.Groups has also shaken up its organizational structure, putting the regional technical operations directly under the CEO's administration.

V.Group is the world's largest technical ship management firm through its V.Ships brand, and it also supplies crewing and procurement services. Private equity group Advent International purchased a controlling stake in the firm in December, and Haris Kyriakopoulos, a director at Advent, said that his company has been working on assembling the new team.